From Bean to Cup: Hand to Machine: How the Harvest Method Affects Your Cup of Coffee
Deel
How does that delicious coffee bean actually get from the bush to your cup? Harvesting coffee cherries may seem simple, but the way it's done has a huge impact on the quality, taste, and price of your coffee.
Coffee farmers worldwide mainly use two methods to harvest the cherries. Time to zoom in on the difference between manual picking and stripping!
1. Manual Picking (Selective Picking)
This is the most labor-intensive and meticulous method in the world. It is almost exclusively applied to specialty coffees and high-quality Arabica beans, where quality and taste are paramount.
How it works: Pickers go bush by bush through the plantation and inspect each coffee cherry by hand. Only cherries that have reached a deep, perfect ripeness are plucked.
The big advantage: Because only carefully selected, ripe cherries are harvested, you get an incredibly pure, complex, and even taste in your cup. Unripe or overripe beans remain on the bush, so they can still be harvested ripe in a subsequent round.
The disadvantage: It requires an enormous amount of time, patience, and manual labor. A picker can only collect a limited amount of cherries per day this way. This makes this coffee much more exclusive and valuable.
2. Machine or Manual Stripping (Strip-picking)
In contrast, there is stripping. This method is more often used on large-scale plantations where efficiency is paramount (often in the production of Robusta beans or mass-market coffee).
How it works: All cherries – ripe, overripe, and unripe – are pulled off the branch in one quick motion. This can be done manually by sweeping a hand along the branch, or mechanically with large, heavy harvesting machines that drive over the rows of plants.
The advantage: It is incredibly fast and efficient. A huge amount of coffee is harvested in a short time, which significantly reduces production costs.
The disadvantage: Because everything is taken at once, a mix of various qualities is created. To prevent this from completely spoiling the taste, a strict sorting process follows the harvest, in which less good or unripe beans are removed as much as possible. Nevertheless, the difference in quality and taste compared to hand-picked coffee often remains noticeable.
The secret of taste
The difference in harvesting method explains why one coffee offers subtle fruit notes and a refined balance, while another coffee is primarily very strong and bitter.
At Henk Pur, we know better than anyone how important this first step in the process is. By consciously choosing beans that have been harvested with care and attention, we select the very best basis for our blends. This way, you taste the ultimate craftsmanship in every sip, from the plantation to your cup!
